Awesome storyteller. My personal favorite was the short story "The Fog Horn". Don't know why. Maybe the bleak, lonely atmosphere of the story appealed to my then-young sense of angst. Who knows.
R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
21–30 of 98 posts
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#22I was just talking about this with my girlfriend, and while we both loved Bradbury deeply, what's odd is that our first thought wasn't of this being a tragic loss. The man lived to 91 - which is three times as long as we've lived so far. Ray Bradbury saw so many amazing things come to pass in his lifetime, and thinking about the things we'll see in our next sixty years is kind of inspiring and lends one a sense of awe. I kind of think that's what Ray Bradbury himself might have preferred - that his life and death inspire in us a sense of wonder. What a fantastic soul he was, in the true sense.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#23RIP Bradbury. Martian Chronicles is indirectly one of the most influential books in my life, due to an interesting twist... In high school, we had a literature class where there was a list of a couple hundred books we could choose from to read each month. At the end of the month, the teacher had a canned test she had purchased somewhere for each book, that we would take to prove our comprehension. For those of you wh…
The very fact that the teacher allowed students to choose what they wanted to read, rather than the books that the teacher him/herself liked (which was the unfortunate case for me), is wonderful. Had I been afforded such a situation, it probably wouldn't have taken me 10 years (after High School) to finally enjoy reading for myself.
And the fact that the teacher saw the flaw with the test and appreciated what you wrote. A teacher/professor who is unwilling to be wrong is the most dangerous kind there is. This teacher clearly was not one of those.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#24We've lost a brilliant voice.
My favorite quote of his, from "Zen in the Art of Writing":
"And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all."
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#25He was the last of the giants, along with Heinlein, Clark and Asimov. As a kid in the 70s, I devoured their novels and stories from the 50s and 60s. Bradbury was probably the most sophisticated writer of the four, though I preferred Asimov's straightforward, techie prose more back then. But we did get to read Bradbury in school, while none of the others was deemed lofty enough for the curriculum (except Heinlein's St…
Orson Scott Card is not too far off, IMO.
Sadly, I found over time his newer books became steadily worse. It's odd to me that someone like Jim Butcher can get steadily better where other authors 'give up', start believing their own hype, use ghost writers, or something.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#26I found Ray Bradbury a difficult read in high school. Not for lack of understand or the style of his writing, but I was reading for a 'surface story', for lack of a better term. I wanted something very future-tech-Sci-Fi, and it didn't fit. It only took a few years, a few real world experiences and one re-read of one story for me to see the depth in his writing, the metaphors about today's and yesterday's societies,…
Dandelion Wine was the story that taught me that sci-fi didn't need space ships or robots to deliver its essential explorations of humans and their relationships with technology. I must have read it 15 years ago, but I still remember the wistful dialogs about the smell of grass clippings in the summer and the roar of lawnmowers, gone forever in a world whose only sci-fi tech was grass that never needed mowing.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#27"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things." - Ray Bradbury 1920-2012.
RIP.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#28I was introduced to Ray Bradbury through The Ray Bradbury Theater tv series, in 7th grade. A fellow classmate, Eric Johnson, was in an episode and so we watched it in class. I enjoyed it - enough that I wanted to see more. I only saw a few more episodes, but from that I took out 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' movie from the Library. I enjoyed that, and ended up diving into some of his written stuff as well. While I didn't read everything the man ever wrote - his work is certainly credited for helping me find literature outside of the normal stuff we're given in school - or what everyone else was reading at the time (David Eddings).
Sidenote: Eric Johnson went on to play the young Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, and Lana Langs boyfriend in the first season of Smallville. I hated him in junior high - he was exceptionally rude to everyone. What's weird, is I was still happy for the guy, whenever I saw him in something new.
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#29“If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
Re: R.I.P. Ray Bradbury, Author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
#30He had a short piece in last week's New Yorker on how "The Fire Balloons" was inspired by the fire balloons he, as a small boy, lit with his grandfather. It was a beautiful testament to his craft and his inspiration. Sadly, behind the paywall: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_... RIP
Lots of his stories are inspired by his family, hometown, and they all show up here and there in his stories. I always saw him as writing humanist sci-fi.